Cage-free shelter offers countless cats second chance

Pet Connection in Avonmore can house as many as 200 cats

UPDATED 7:05 PM EST Feb 21, 2013

AVONMORE, Pa. -

For Valerie Scobel, it all started in 1993 with an article in a local paper looking for foster homes and volunteers.

“I responded to the ad, and I told them that I would foster some cats for them, and ‘foster some cats’ turned into about 40 to 50 within six months. I had them in my home, in my garage, but when we bought this property, we decided we could put up a building on it,” Scobel told Channel 4 Action News.

In the 20 years since then, the nonprofit Pet Connection adoption and rescue center on Sunrise Lane in Avonmore has grown to be able to house as many as 200 cats.

“It’s quite a success story for us to be able to house 20 to 30 cats initially, and now be able to house 150 to sometimes 200,” said Scobel, the shelter’s director.

The cage-free, home-like environment was built in 1996, with an addition being built in 2004. The facility features a main living room, a laundry room, a kitchen and an open room with 19 windows.

Incoming cats are quarantined until they’ve been tested and received their vaccinations. They’re also spayed and neutered before slowly being introduced into the general population.

“Because we get to know their personalities, I think that’s what sets us apart, a little bit, from a regular shelter,” said Scobel.

A cat’s personality plays a big factor in where it will be placed in the shelter.

“If they’re a shy cat who might need some more attention, we’ll put them in the area of the kitchen part of the building, which is where our volunteers spend a lot of time washing dishes and litter boxes, so the cat gets to see people more often. If they’re more of an outgoing cat or playful, they go on to the main part of our building, where they have a lot of other cats that they can interact with,” said Scobel.

Scobel said the open environment helps better match the cats with potential adopters because they’re not seeing “frightened animals sitting in cages.”

“They’re seeing cats who are comfortable sleeping in cat beds, lying on the furniture, climbing cat trees, playing. They get a lot of mental stimulation here,” she said.

The shelter doesn’t receive any funding and relies solely on private donations and a staff of volunteers.

“We have a wonderful core group of volunteers. We don’t have many, but the ones that we have are really, really important to running the facility,” said Scobel. “The funding that we do receive, we put it all back into the animals.”

Scobel said the biggest way someone can help the shelter is through monetary donations and volunteering.

But for Scobel, the greatest gift she can give is that of a second chance.

“To take something that somebody can discard, a living creature that somebody can discard as if they were getting rid of an old couch, and to be able to rehabilitate it and give it a second chance and send on to a home, and then to go even beyond and hear from that home two years, three years, five years after they’ve adopted that cat from you really, really makes everything I do all worthwhile because it shows me that these animals were offered a second chance, and if somebody hadn’t stepped in, they may not have gotten that chance in the first place,” she said.